Teaching Strategies

Work during 2016
Over the last term my team and I have been working towards developing learning blogs with our students.
I created a year 8 blog which now acts like the old traditional white board. Students now have access to learning 24/7 and from anywhere in the world. Parents and whanau members can also go onto our blog and look at the work students are doing, help students at home and check on the progress students have made via students own learning blogs.
We have also utilize the use of google classroom when sharing practise activities, reading material, assignments when students are needing their own individual copies.

The beauty of working this way is that it allows the teacher to become more of a facilitator of learning by freeing up time to work with individual students, students can work together using shared google doc (and they don't even need to be in the same place to do this) and with time it is my hope that the students become self directed learners as they also have instant access to information they are interested in.

One of the negative aspects of working online and this is the only negative that I see at this time is that students are often very distracted by gaming, facebook, youtube and social networking.
Hapara student dashboard is being trialed at the moment and might help in providing greater on task behaviour.
One of the other ways to combat this issue is to include some of these sites into the teaching programme. ie social networking, youtube, facebook. which I often do in maths and inquiry.

Below is a link to our blog. You will also noticed is that it also links to our student blogs. Please feel free to look through them and make some positive comments on their work. Our students love reading positive comments about their work.
http://tarawerayear8.blogspot.co.nz/

ALL writing slide presentation

My ALL writing slide presentation.

The Classroom of 2030

An interesting and inspiring watch.

Inspiring students of the future

An inspiring video of how I aim to run my classroom.

Using the 5c's, Choice, Collaboration, Communication, Critical thinking, Creativity.

After years of teaching I have come to the conclusion that teaching should be based around research/evidenced based teaching programmes and strong relationships with students.

I enjoyed watching this video. It confirms for me my interest in developing future proof teaching techniques and helping students to develop critical thinking and essential skills.

"Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think."

Albert Einstein-1879-1955

Note from e-asTTle course

Using e-asTTle
• The data needs to be used to inform teaching and learning.
• Students should use this assessment and its reports to help understand their current skills and knowledge and inform their learning goals.
• In order to provide accurate results, and useful data, testing needs to be done by current achievement level, not year group.
• The results need to be interpreted alongside other evidence to ensure that good teaching and learning decisions are made.
• A student’s test score in NOT an Overall Teacher Judgment as it simply does not even come close to encompassing the broad set of skills and knowledge described in the standards.
• If students of wide ability take the same test it is really only the ‘average’ sector where any useful information will be gained.
Getting too many right or wrong provides us with very little information.
Implication
• Test students on current achievement levels, not age.
• It may be necessary to create up to four different tests for some cohorts. Each student is then assigned to a test which is challenging for him/her.
• If we want to get good information from e-asTTle, the students need to get some answers wrong.
• A student that gets 100% correct gives little information on his/her next learning steps and e-asTTle has to extrapolate to give an indication of achievement. This is not necessarily an accurate score.
• Copying a test allows you to use the same test with a different group of students. Copying rather than reassigning the same test allows you to keep the two sets of data separate.
• Creating a similar test means that you can create a test using the same settings as previously but it will result in a new set of questions.
• A better option if testing the same set of students again is to create a slightly harder test. This will be a better fit for the students as it acknowledges the progress they have made throughout the year.
• Don’t test kids who are not reading at age 8.
· Share with the students their scores and their next steps.
· Show the cut score and celebrate the successes not the overall score.

2015 reflection

This has been a fantastic learning year for me. I started the year at James Street school. During term 2 I made a change to teach a year 8 class at Tarawera High school.

On my arrival I first noticed that the class seemed to be in a state of disarray. The students lack structure and routine. They had a teacher that had had a lot of time off and a term of relievers.
Drawing on my experience gained from PB4L, the Incredible Years programme and 15 years of teaching experience, I knew that I had to develop a strong trusting relationship with the students and set a class programme where all students felt like they were being successful in their learning.

I tried group teaching in reading, maths, and writing but found that the students weren't able to self manage and needed whole class teaching in order to develop a healthy classroom environment and establish a level of order.
At the same time I started to develop a relationship with some of the more challenging students in the class and their parents.
I found that providing  one on one time with these students enabled them to share their interests with me, home life, their concerns and social issues, which enabled students to start developing trust in me.

During this time I developed a relationship with home through phone calls, texts, and inviting parents to meet with me during my release times. Taking sports group also help to create the connection with students whanau.

I have also gain professional development in the use of google docs, google classroom and using
e-asTTle. I am still currently in the process of upskilling in e-asTTle and have a course to attend later in the term.

Using Google Classroom

Over the last two weeks I have been using Google classroom. It did take a bit to set up. Loading students google mail addresses, learning how google classroom works, loading work and identifying which students are following the activities assigned.
I am still learning how to track kids learning using google classroom.
Below is a link of PD that I have been following.

http://teachingtarawera.blogspot.co.nz/2015/08/using-google-classroom.html

The students are enjoying working from google classroom and have been saving a lot of their work to their personal learning blogs.